PHP PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can't initialize character set utf8mb4

Question

I have drupal 8 installed on Centos 6. Here is my php and mysql -version output

Server version: 5.7.9 MySQL Community Server (GPL) PHP 5.6.14 (cli) (built: Oct 16 2015 08:41:09)

But i still getting a connection error

PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2019] Can't initialize character set utf8mb4 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/) in /var/www/m2m/core/lib/Drupal/Component/DependencyInjection/PhpArrayContainer.php on line 83

I also have this configuration on my OS X Mysql Server version: 5.6.27 Homebrew and PHP 5.6.15 (cli) (built: Oct 31 2015 07:39:39)

and everything is ok.

Do you have any idea? Any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

I had the same problem on CentOS, all packages up-to-date. Issue was with the mysql driver. Fixed by running the following:

yum erase php56w-mysql
yum install php56w-mysqlnd

And restarting the webserver.